Evaluating+Sources

(Brian) American Library Association. The Booklist. Chicago: The Association, 1905-. . Published 22 times a year by the American Library Association, The Booklist is a collection of book, audiobook, video, and DVD reviews, with a primary focus on popular-interest and reference materials. The intended audiences for the magazine are public and school libraries, and acquisition librarians in particular. The magazine publishes over 8,000 reviews per year. All materials reviewed are “recommended,” and exceptional materials receive a star. Reviews are brief and feature a summary, basic publishing and cost information, and sometimes a description of the physical attributes of the book. ProQuest offers issues from 1991 to present, with full text and PDF formats since late-1997 and abstracts and a “find” article option prior to then. The Booklist has a more popular-interest focus than competitors such as ARBAonline and Choice Reviews.

(Meredith) ARBAonline.  Available from GSLIS Eresources Menu. ARBAonline (American Reference Books Annual) is an online and print resource providing comprehensive reviews of print and electronic reference works published in the U.S and Canada. ARBA reviews are written by subject specialists and the resource is noted for its thorough descriptions and critical evaluations. A reference source written ‘by librarians for librarians,’ it is well regarded as a collection development tool by the library community.1 Each review includes a bibliographic citation, price, reviewer's name and locale, date of review, and a concise description and evaluation of the content. Reviewers are encouraged to make recommendations for placing the source in an appropriate library setting. Monthly reviews and updates have been provided in print since 1997 and the on-line version debuted in 2002. ARBAonline is easy to search by author, ISBN, publisher, subject, and title as well as browse by subject index. Comparable sites include ChoiceReviews and BookList but, ARBA is geared towards a wider range of libraries i.e. public, undergraduate, school, special and academic. 1. OCLC, WorldCat, Dublin Ohio: OCLC, 1971.

(Graham) Association of College and Research Libraries. ChoiceReviews Online. Middletown, Conn.: Association of College and Reference Libraries, 1988. . Choice Reviews Online is an online source that provides reviews of more than 7,000 new or current academic titles, electronic media, and Web resources to more than 35,000 librarians and faculty in or concerned with undergraduate college and university libraries across the United States; it features more than 600 brief reviews per month (except July-August) by faculty or other experts in a pertinent field, arranged by broad subject area and then by subdiscipline, ranked alphabetically; each review includes full bibliographic information and price, as well as a summary evaluation from Essential down to Not Recommended. Notable features include a regular article on forthcoming titles in a given discipline and a bibliographic essay that rounds up both recent and classic works on a single subject of current interest, as in the current month's essay on citizenship (Kivisto, Peter. "Citizenship Today: Vicissitudes and Promise." Choice, v.47, no. 06, February 2010). Each January issue has a special feature on the outstanding academic titles of the prior year (a coveted mention in academic circles). For its timeliness, brevity, ease of use, and subject expertise, this is a crucial resource for the academic librarian. One sample question it might answer well: “My university has just hired a professor whose subspecialty is new to our academic community. I need to develop a collection that will support her research and classes—where do I start?” While it is in many ways comparable to Library Journal, its focus is more consistently academic. Current online issue: February 2010.

(Justin D.) Balay, Robert, Vee Friesner Carrington, and Murray S. Martin. Guide to Reference Books. Chicago: American Library Association, 1996. GSLIS Office Reserve. Guide to Reference Books is a refereed bibliography published by the American Library Association and is aimed at helping librarians develop reference collections and find sources, helping end users find information, and training student librarians. Its content is broken down both by subject in the front matter, and in an alphabetic index of citations and subject headings in an index in the back matter. This reference makes claims of authority and completeness by prominently and clearly attributing those who have contributed to the final work and appealing to the authority of previous editions. The foreword explains the book’s citation selection process and its methods and sources. Librarians in all types of libraries may find this book useful to help them build collections and find vetted citations. End users may find this book frustrating because its contents will probably raise more questions and result in more research than consulting a database of primary sources. The utility of this book will probably be determined by its reader’s pre-existing search skills. Library and information professionals will most likely find this book easy to use and fruitful. Guide to Reference Books is a book by librarians, mostly for librarians, and will probably be fundamental to the function of any-sized reference service.

(Todd) Bopp, Richard E., and Linda C. Smith. Reference and Information Services : An Introduction. Englewood, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited, 2001. GSLIS Office Reserve. This audience for this text is primarily LIS students as it is frequently used as a textbook. The 3rd edition improves the relevancy of the volume by including online resources and "scenario boxes"(incl. typical ILL problems, illustrating search strategies, etc.), but the 2001 publication date suggests a work that is already outdated as electronic reference transactions and databases like Kieft's Guide to Reference are more of a norm. Chapter 2 moves beyond the typical cannon and discusses Ethical Aspects of Reference Services and includes a discussion about how reference librarians should respond to a teen girl requesting a book about suicide. Part 2 (sources) introduces and describes major reference sources: electronic, online, and print. One standout feature is that that Bopp and Smith provide a more comprehensive historical context to the sources they review than other comparable efforts offer. Two indexes in the back of the book: Author/Title & Subject. A comparable (and more recently published work) is Cassell and Hiremath's Reference and Information Services in the 21st Century.

(Erika) Charleston Company. The Charleston Advisor. Denver, CO: Charleston Comp., 1999-.  Available from GSLIS Eresources Menu. The Charleston Advisor is a journal that publishes reviews of online resources and products for librarians. All reviews are written and peer-reviewed by other librarians, ensuring that the information is accurate and useful for those in the field. TCA reviewers score each resource through a standard process that includes content, searchability, price, and contract options/features. The composite score is based on a five star model. Reviews include basic information and a description of the resource, strengths and weaknesses, a partial list of subscribers, reader opinion from their forum, and new information as its available. TCA is available in print and on the web, new issues come out four times per year. Unlike comparable sites such as ChoiceReviews and ARBAonline, TCA exclusively reviews web-based products.

(Laurie) Guide to Reference.  Available from GSLIS Eresources Menu.1902-96 available in print. The purpose of the Guide is to evaluate a comprehensive group of reference sources for answering questions, directing researchers, creating local instructional materials, educating & training library school students and ref staff, inventorying & developing ref collections. They help define what a reference source is & help how to choose the sources to enter or purchase. Example search: "British history." Start in History and area Studies (2185 sources)→History of Europe (604)→Europe by Country (502)→Great Britain (26)→A companion to nineteenth-century Britain: From here you can read an annotated descriptiption of the source, & when logged into your user profile you can export, make lists &/or notes, print, email. At the citation you can click on "Find" it brings you to WorldCat to sometimes do a Google book preview, locate the nearest book by mileage from your IP address, or search for an electronic source (must sign into WorldCat via Simmons site, however); If available, can go to the web site & begin searching immediately. It's not always for immediate searching within the source. It's to find the sources out there that you could use to answer the reference questions. ARBAonline & Sweetland's Fundamental Reference Sources are comparable.

(Brianna) Lanning, Scott, and John Bryner. Essential Reference Services for Today's School Media Specialists. Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited, 2004. GSLIS Office Reserve. This print source is a guide to providing reference service in a modern, rapidly changing school library environment. Aimed at an audience of school media specialists (also known as school librarians), this source explores three broad concepts of reference service - core reference skills, electronic resources, and leadership skills – to help the school media specialist become an informed and integrated member of the school community served by the library. For example, this source could provide an answer to the following questions: What is information literacy? How can I help classroom teachers meet their core curriculum goals? School libraries would likely offer this book as a reference source for their own school library staff. This source could also be found in academic libraries of institutions offering school library and / or education programs of study. The arrangement of the material is intuitive, using the standard separation of content into chapters by topic with subdividions of relevant subtopics within each chapter. The book provides a thorough table of contents at its start and an alphabetical index at its end. Searches using www.amazon.com and www.google.com did not reveal any other sources on the topic for comparison. The authors’ background in public library service and school library service offer both an authority on the topic as well as potential subjectivity. While there are numerous sources available to teach the fundamentals of reference services, to guide the collection development of a school library, or to tranform librarians into leaders, this source is unique in that it combines all three elements in one easy to use reference tool.

(Codey) O'Gorman, Jack. Reference Sources for Small and Medium-Sized Libraries. 7th ed. Chicago: American Library Association, 2008. GSLIS Office Reserve.

O’Gorman’s book lists reference resources and provides the reader with general bibliographic information about each title as well as a short description; the book is designed for small to medium sized libraries with minimal resources for reference. It provides the reader with the title, author, publisher, year, ISBN number, how expensive in a three tiered price system ($, $$, $$$) and a short paragraph about the contents of the reference resource. O’Gorman’s work is fairly unique in that it is very comprehensive being in its second edition. There are other books on the subject such as Hysell’s Recommended Reference Books for Small and Medium-sized Libraries and Media Centers. Finally, a sample entry is that of Liddell and Scott's 'Greek and English Lexicon' and of course tell of its fame in the dictionary world as well as the pertinent information mentioned above.

(Laura) Safford, Barbara Ripp, and Margaret Irby Nichols. Guide to Reference Materials for School Library Media Centers. 5th ed. Englewood, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited, 1998. GSLIS Office Reserve. The Guide to Reference Materials for School Library Media Centers is a list of sources, topically organized, that is intended to aid School Library Media Specialists in purchasing reference materials. The guide includes information on age and grade appropriateness as well as a full citation, brief summary, and cost of each item. It covers a wide number of subjects found in school libraries and seems well organized with a table of contents, an author/title index, and a subject index. Small, dense text with no pictures hinders readability. In a quick search, I could not find any obvious competitors with this book, only books that were more about reference services than materials. The work seems well researched, but the last update was in 1998. Sample question: My SLMC needs more materials about rocks and minerals. What should I order?”

(Dave) Sweetland, James H., and Frances Neel Cheney. '''Fundamental Reference Sources. 3rd ed.''' Chicago: American Library Association, 2000. GSLIS Office Reserve. Like the first two, this, the third edition of Sweetland’s Fundamental Reference Sources, is an introduction to selected sources of bibliographical, biographical, linguistic, statistical, and geographical organization. It is an authoritative reference source on reference sources featuring the best materials in all media for all types of libraries to meet the needs of a multicultural audience. The book outlines what is required to easily locate, evaluate, and select the best information sources. In doing so, Sweetland, a LIS professor at the University of Wisconsin with a long list of credentials, shows how to meet the audience’s needs using non-English sources, biographical listings of underrepresented populations, and bilingual dictionaries. In addition to showing how to find more electronic and non-print media, government publications, collective indexes, and abstracts, the book explains how to identify current electronic resources for each reference category. Compared to the first two editions, this edition is completely revised and reflects substantial changes to the organization of its contents, an increased emphasis on evaluation, and the increasing use of electronic formats. Intuitively displayed material is followed with a back-of-the-book section on acronyms and initialisms, an appendix, and index.